[UPDATE 7-19: Kim Lowe has adapted the prospectus revision I did for La Escuela Freire, using it for the text of a pilot website]

I met today with a great group of people in Santa Ana who are trying to create a charter school within the public school system of Santa Ana that will work on the ideas of Paulo Freire and John Dewey. In fact, I guess I joined them.

The new charter school is just in the starting phases. Advice on non-profit status and an offer of help from an expert, planning the initial proposal for the state of California, and progress on a location, and strategies for approaching city officials were on the agenda today. If all goes according to plan the hope is to open the school in 2010. Nearly all the students would come from Santa Ana.

The goal is to create a bilingual or trilingual school training what one organizer has described as "global citizens." Another way to describe it as I understood from over two hours of conversation today is that it would be a school that gives frustrated and alienated Santa Ana students a genuine alternative. The school will help address the drop-out problem in Santa Ana, one of the worst in the country, by providing a space where youth focus on the solution of problems, where they guide much of the governance and the curriculum, and where they gain leadership and practical experience. And it would be a community space--open to the public most of the day, with an adult education component partly online. That's how the prospectus describes some of the vision.

Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (as well as other works) is a clear guide for the practical and worldly liberation theme of the school's vision.

Santa Ana needs such a school badly. There are successful Freire schools elsewhere in the country, perhaps most notably the Philadelphia's Freire Charter School. This school would be an alternative that could help community preservation, teacher retention, and student motivation. The Freire model motivates teachers and students through efforts to explore, understand, and attempt to resolve the real life challenges of the community and the individual students. Motivation and relevance are clearly critical parts of successful schools.